Ladera Ranch family pushes for change in youth football after loss of son

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The Ransom family. Courtney and Greg and their two daughters, Julia, 16, upper left, and Lillie, 12, at their home in Ladera Ranch on April 14, 2018. Their son, James, at left, committed suicide in 2016 after sustaining a brain injury playing football. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

LADERA RANCH – Greg Ransom did not see the hit that led to his son’s death, but since that night two Septembers ago, he has imagined over and over the circumstances that led to the moment when everything fell apart.

He’s sitting at the dinner table, reliving it all, obsessing over the same what-ifs, one February afternoon, when he turns to a photo of his son. It’s one of many pasted onto a collage he made for the funeral. In the photo, James Ransom is draped in oversized shoulder pads and a blue Stallions jersey, flashing a smile full of braces.

His voice is a stew of grief and guilt. “I can’t look at this anymore,” he decides.

Greg was the one who introduced his son to football, who signed him up for Pop Warner at age 9, who went to all of his games and volunteered as team manager. He was on the sideline that day, tracking snaps, as one boy came sprinting downhill toward his son. He did not see their helmets collide, but in some moments, he’s still haunted by questions of how and why.

The Ransoms paid extra for their son’s helmet, just to be safe. The truth is neither Greg nor his wife, Courtney, ever worried about him on the football field. By 12, James had played three years of tackle. He was one of the Stallions’ biggest players. He was tough, the kind of kid who scraped a knee and kept moving. That night, after the hit, he acted no different. It wasn’t until later, away from the field’s amber glow, that Greg noticed the dried blood around his ear.

He told Greg he was fine, that he’d had his “bell rung”. They drove home, thinking little of it.

The next November, James committed suicide. He was 13. There were no answers to be found, no explanations to be had, nothing to hold onto but the cruelty of it all. It took just one hit for their son to suffer a traumatic brain injury playing football. And now, a little over a year later, he was gone.

The issues preceding his suicide – the memory loss, the mood swings, the erratic, obsessive behavior – all traced back to that moment under the lights of the football field. In his grief, Greg has clung to this notion. It felt like the only way to make sense of the senseless.

Courtney wonders how productive it is, fixating on the circumstances of their son’s injury, as opposed to what came after. She doesn’t talk much about football. “(Greg) is extremely emotional about it,” she explains. And as such, they’ve taken their own paths in coping with grief, Courtney throwing herself into work, spending most of her time in Boston; Greg poring over neuroscience studies, playing podcasts and audiobooks on an endless loop to keep his mind from wandering.

Greg hasn’t watched football since. The connection is too clear, too painful. Asked about the sport his boy once loved, he dries his eyes. His voice sharpens.

“Football killed my son,” he says.

He pauses. Greg has shared these feelings before. Never to a reporter, never with the intent of being heard. But the time feels right to tell his son’s story, and as a bill to ban youth tackle football makes its way toward the state legislature, setting off a heated debate, this notion is never far from his mind.

Before the hit, Greg had never really considered what one helmet colliding with another might do to a child’s brain. He hadn’t followed any of the research, from which serious concerns about the safety of youth football were mounting. He’d barely even heard of CTE.

He looked past it all, he explains. “You don’t want to know, to a point. Especially if your kid is already in football. You don’t want to believe they could be damaging their brain.”

As the picture of youth football’s long-term cognitive risk comes into clearer focus, questions about when, if ever, kids should be allowed to play the game grow ever louder. A recent study from Boston University surveyed 214 former high school, college, or pro players and found that those who played youth tackle football before the age of 12 were twice as likely to develop behavioral problems and three times more likely to develop depression. Another Boston University study, published in January, detailed the strongest link yet between repetitive, subconcussive hits and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

In light of new research and growing concerns, lawmakers are beginning to step in.

In California, the “Safe Youth Football Act” was introduced in early February, just as youth tackle football legislation in three other states was falling apart. The bill proposed to ban tackle football for children under 12. But amid protests from angry youth football leaders and a lack of legislative support, it was pulled last Thursday, before it was argued in committee.

In the months before its failure, as heated debate divided the state, Greg followed the bill from a distance. He had no plans to be involved. He’s an ardent libertarian, so solid in his ideology that he maintains a blog based on the work of a libertarian philosopher. To support the government legislating a minimum age for football was, depending who you ask, in contradiction of these beliefs.

But as he listened to parents and coaches proclaim their right to choose football for their child, he thought of James. He thought of how often the state legislated to protect kids. He wondered how many parents, like him, didn’t understand the risk.

“When you’re a kid, you’re not making choices on your own,” Greg says. “Your parents shouldn’t be allowed to put you in danger.”

Around Ladera Ranch, fliers are already advertising a new season of Pop Warner. Sign-ups opened Feb. 10, two days after the bill was proposed.

His voice wavers as he mentions it. He’s never felt so far from that community. He understands why people love football. But it’s clear, as discussion over the bill turns toxic, that so many don’t understand what it’s cost people like him or his son.

“Everyone has to be on the same page,” he says, “if we want to protect these kids.”

***

Around the house, their son is everywhere. Above the staircase. On the mantel. In the fancy photobooks they splurged to have made. In the pictures, that same boyish, hopeful grin is frozen in time, between round, freckled cheeks. It’s how Courtney Ransom would like to remember her son now.

He was so sunny and engaging, hugging everyone he met, talking to anyone he could, that in the weeks after that damaging hit, the shift in him was so jarring, so unexpected that it didn’t feel real. This wasn’t James. It couldn’t be.

Their James was a parents’ dream, wide-eyed and brilliant. “He was just fascinated with the world,” his father says. At 4, he concocted an idea for a rocket that would launch the family’s trash into space. From then on, his childhood was a constant search of adventure. A treehouse at the end of the block one week. Plans for a homemade rollercoaster another. Once, he decided to fill their small back patio with sand to throw a beach party.

By the start of the seventh grade, James could code in three languages. He spent hours building elaborate simulations on Minecraft, and that fall, his parents signed him up for a programming class at Saddleback College, just to challenge him.

But few things made James happy like football could. Courtney’s father played college football, and her son’s love of the game was so immediate it seemed genetic. James was sharp and strong, a natural offensive lineman. When coaches assigned players to learn the playbook, he devoured his in one sitting, memorizing it within hours.

“He got a lot of really great things from football,” Courtney says.

She sighs. It’s difficult to reconcile now, given all they’ve lost, but for his mother, drawing a straight line between football and her son’s suicide, assigning such outright blame, is not as simple as her husband makes it look.

Instead, she focused her grief on improving mental health resources for children. Because over those first few months, no one seemed to know what was happening to her son.

James seemed fine at first. He returned to practice on Monday and stayed through Tuesday. But a day later, the dizziness set in, and his vision went blurry. He grew more and more nauseated. His balance was off. A doctor diagnosed him with a concussion. They had no idea how much worse it was.

“Within a week,” Courtney says, “he was completely out of control.”

Without warning, his perpetually sunny disposition faded. His behavior turned erratic and aggressive. He lashed out, throwing tantrums in which he rocked back and forth, chattering his teeth.

At school, he struggled to focus. When he fell behind, he obsessed over schoolwork he couldn’t finish. One day, in the school parking lot, he threw himself to the ground and refused to go inside.

They ushered James from one specialist to another in a desperate search for answers. A physical therapist noted third-nerve palsy, an eye condition common with traumatic brain injury. An ophthalmologist told them James lost a quarter of his peripheral vision. His neurologist pointed to damage in the part of the brain that dictates behavior, and told them, yes, it was likely from football.

“It was such a hard thing for him to cope with, that he’d damaged himself,” Greg says. His child psychologist advised them not to overreact.

And they didn’t, until 2:30 a.m., one December night, when Courtney awoke to a strange noise. Instinctively, she ran upstairs. She saw a belt was hanging out the door of James’ bathroom.

Courtney could hear her son breathing inside as she pounded on it. When Greg busted it open, James was on the floor crying, a belt mark around his neck. “I just want my brain to shut off,” he told them through tears. It’d been three months since the hit.

They admitted him to the neuropsychiatric ward at UC Irvine. He tried to commit suicide again, dismantling his retainer in an attempt to electrocute himself. Doctors put him on anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants, but seemed at a loss. “They’d never had a suicidal 12-year-old before,” Greg says.

It was months before he returned home. When he did, Courtney spent half of her nights sleeping on the staircase up to his room. But slowly, surely, things crept back to normal. He went back to school. They managed. Eager to get away, the family booked a trip to Hawaii for late November.

A canvas from that trip hangs in their living room. In the photo, James is sitting in a lounge chair, smiling naturally. He looks happy, hopeful even. His sister, Julia, told him it was her favorite picture of him. He decided it was his favorite, too.

Three days after they returned, Courtney noticed the calendar in his room was gone. It seemed so insignificant then. But now, the details of that night, however minute, are burned into her memory: Where their daughter, Lillie, was sitting. How Lillie asked James to read together. How Courtney asked him about medication, and how he drank a full glass of water with the pills, gulping them down. “See you tomorrow, love you,” she told him, before he turned around and walked upstairs.

It’s been 17 months since James took his own life that night. And still, it’s hard not to search for signs of how they might have known.

“There’s no explaining it,” Courtney says now, but in the immediate fog of grief, she tried anyway, scouring the internet for stories of children lost to suicide. She was struck by a troubling trend: “In almost every story, somewhere, there was a concussion in that kid’s life.”

She knew she would talk about James and what happened someday. But she’s still reluctant to take the stand that her husband has taken, arguing on Twitter, debating football publicly, blaming it outright. In an emotional debate, their differences are pronounced. She doesn’t want to be polarizing. She just doesn’t want any other family to endure what they have.

“I have a really hard time having a son who committed suicide at age 13,” Courtney says. “My job was to get this kid through life. To the extent that I made the decision to allow him to play a sport that I believe had an impact resulting in his death — that’s something I can’t reconcile.”

“If I could take that back, I would in a second. I would do anything.”

***

It’s a warm spring afternoon in April, and the sun is shining on Poet’s Park, where Greg and Courtney and their daughters, Julia and Lillie, are gathered around a bench inscribed with James’ name. The family hasn’t been together much lately. They still feel the weight of his absence. But they’re starting to move forward now, one day, one week, one month at a time, and here, in front of his bench, the memory of James and his adventures has them together and laughing, and ever so slightly, the heartache subsides.

A quote on the bench in Poet’s Park in Ladera Ranch dedicated to James Ransom. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Last year, they created the James Henry Ransom Foundation and held a 5K to benefit the adolescent mental and behavioral program at Mission Hospital. They raised $35,000 in his name, and in November, they’re planning another race.

“We’re starting to get our feet under us,” Courtney says. “We’re trying to do some good.”

Back at the house, Greg announces he’s planning a trip to Sacramento. He wants to help support the bill, to meet with lawmakers, to tell James’ story. He’d been so apprehensive at first, but as the bill persists, he’s had a change of heart.

It feels like progress to speak so publicly about his son. But when the day comes, car trouble keeps him home. Soon, Faces of CTE, the group he planned to lobby with, pulls its support. A few days later, AB 2108 is pulled from committee.

“I’m not surprised at how hard this is going to be moving forward,” Greg says.

Years ago, he’d almost been an anarchist. Now, he was asking the state to intervene on youth football.

“People love football,” he says. He understands change takes time.

But in the distant wake of tragedy, Greg still has hope it will come. And for now, hope feels like enough.

Ryan Kartje is a sports features reporter, with a special focus on the NFL and college sports. He has worked for the Orange County Register since 2012, when he was hired as UCLA beat writer. His enterprise work on the rise and fall of the daily fantasy sports industry (http://www.ocregister.com/articles/industry-689093-fantasy-daily.html) was honored in 2015 with an Associated Press Sports Editors’ enterprise award in the highest circulation category. His writing has also been honored by the Football Writers Association of America and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Ryan worked for the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times and Fox Sports Wisconsin, before moving out west to live by the beach and eat copious amounts of burritos.